Friday, September 15, 2006

Day 4 - Dubois, WY to Valentine, NE

Sometimes when you're lost in the middle of nowhere, it's best to just swallow yor pride and ask a local. Today I did just that. In fact, I strolled right into the police station in Douglas, WY and the friendly cop there cheerfully gave us the directions we needed.

We explained to him that we were riding cross-country on very small bikes and that made him curious, so I invited him to check our bikes out. When he saw the scooters, he stopped short and said, "Whoa, did you guys lose a bet or something?" Hahaha!

Today's ride was all about the Great Plains, a starkly beautiful place. At one point, I was trying to imagine what J.R.R. Tolkein would write if he saw the landscape we drove through today. No doubt, he would have seen the hidden beauty and detail that's a little hard to see when you're whizing by on a scooter.

Here is a brief list of details that would have to be in any story I wrote about the place: endless grasslands, giant stone outcroppings, cows, telephone wires, barbed wire, sky, cliffs, and a telephone poles with no wires on them. Is that enough to start a story? I don't know...

We rode into Valentine after dark and the scooter of the guy I'm riding with burned out both it's headlights, so we ended up riding side by side and the Blur's excellent headlight showed the way into Valentine.